For years now, the common American penis bird has been a staple of every
American's daily diet. Whether it be penis bird sandwiches, fried penis
bird, or perhaps penis bird under glass (for the rich), we all have
penis bird at least once a day. Many Americans have no clue how the
penis bird became so important in the pyramid of a balanced diet, so in
this article I will attempt to explain its history and why it is so useful.
In the early 1870s, Francis Zefran became the first penis bird breeder
in North America. He started his famous Penis Bird Ranch in Canton, OH.
At the time, not much was known of the penis bird's nutritional value,
but the Penis Bird Ranch changed all of that. Not only did Francis
Zefran raise penis birds to sell their colorful plumes (a VERY lucrative
business), he also set up the world's first research lab dedicated
solely to the study of the penis bird.
The lab found many interesting things. First, it was discovered that
thepenis bird was actually semi-sentient. Second, the scientists found
that the meat of the penis bird was high in protein, vitamin A, vitamin
B, and calcium, while low in fat, cholestorol, and sodium. Never before
had such a nutritious meal been had without supplement or fortification.
The scientists of the lab recommended immediately that the penis bird
become a part of every American's daily diet.
When the news of the penis bird's usefulness reached president
Rutherford B. Hayes, he was absolutely ecstatic. You see, President
Hayes owed a number of favors to Francis Zefran because as I said
earlier, the penis bird plume trade was an extremely lucrative business
and Mr. Zefran was important in getting RBH elected through a number of
monetary gifts. President Hayes immediately asked Congress to pass what
we all know today as the Hayes/Zefran Penis Bird Consumption Act.
The act did a number of things to make the penis bird a daily meal, most
important of which was the requirement that for every four people in a
household, one penis bird must consumed every day. Another thing the act
did was create an artificial monopoly for Francis Zefran's Penis Bird
Industries. The act stated that the only supplier of penis bird meat in
the US would be PBI. As one would imagine, this quickly made Francis
Zefran into the richest man in the world. He was soon a
multi-billionaire (quadrillionaire with today's inflation). Never before
had a single man seen such wealth.
Many challenges were made to the Hayes/Zefran Penis Bird Consumption
Act, and several even made it the Supreme Court. It was argued that the
act was unconstitutional and went against liberty itself, but once the
detractors tasted delicious penis bird meat for the first time, they
immediately dropped their cases and followed the law to the letter. We
all know today that penis bird is the most delicious meat man has ever
known, but at that time, the only meats people ate were pork and beef.
In the early 1970s, though, challenges to the act began again. Many
argued that the monopoly given to Penis Bird Industries by the act was
in all ways unamerican. The Supreme Court finally agreed, and in 1974,
Section II of the act was struck down. This in effect opened the market
to competition for all.
Today, Penis Bird Industries is almost no more. Today we have the market
leader Penis Bird Meat International facing against Penissoft, a recent
startup. Where will the future lead the penis bird market? Only time
will tell us, but one thing is certain: penis birds are here to stay!
For years now, the common American penis bird has been a staple of every
American's daily diet. Whether it be penis bird sandwiches, fried penis
bird, or perhaps penis bird under glass (for the rich), we all have
penis bird at least once a day. Many Americans have no clue how the
penis bird became so important in the pyramid of a balanced diet, so in
this article I will attempt to explain its history and why it is so useful.
In the early 1870s, Francis Zefran became the first penis bird breeder
in North America. He started his famous Penis Bird Ranch in Canton, OH.
At the time, not much was known of the penis bird's nutritional value,
but the Penis Bird Ranch changed all of that. Not only did Francis
Zefran raise penis birds to sell their colorful plumes (a VERY lucrative
business), he also set up the world's first research lab dedicated
solely to the study of the penis bird.
The lab found many interesting things. First, it was discovered that
thepenis bird was actually semi-sentient. Second, the scientists found
that the meat of the penis bird was high in protein, vitamin A, vitamin
B, and calcium, while low in fat, cholestorol, and sodium. Never before
had such a nutritious meal been had without supplement or fortification.
The scientists of the lab recommended immediately that the penis bird
become a part of every American's daily diet.
When the news of the penis bird's usefulness reached president
Rutherford B. Hayes, he was absolutely ecstatic. You see, President
Hayes owed a number of favors to Francis Zefran because as I said
earlier, the penis bird plume trade was an extremely lucrative business
and Mr. Zefran was important in getting RBH elected through a number of
monetary gifts. President Hayes immediately asked Congress to pass what
we all know today as the Hayes/Zefran Penis Bird Consumption Act.
The act did a number of things to make the penis bird a daily meal, most
important of which was the requirement that for every four people in a
household, one penis bird must consumed every day. Another thing the act
did was create an artificial monopoly for Francis Zefran's Penis Bird
Industries. The act stated that the only supplier of penis bird meat in
the US would be PBI. As one would imagine, this quickly made Francis
Zefran into the richest man in the world. He was soon a
multi-billionaire (quadrillionaire with today's inflation). Never before
had a single man seen such wealth.
Many challenges were made to the Hayes/Zefran Penis Bird Consumption
Act, and several even made it the Supreme Court. It was argued that the
act was unconstitutional and went against liberty itself, but once the
detractors tasted delicious penis bird meat for the first time, they
immediately dropped their cases and followed the law to the letter. We
all know today that penis bird is the most delicious meat man has ever
known, but at that time, the only meats people ate were pork and beef.
In the early 1970s, though, challenges to the act began again. Many
argued that the monopoly given to Penis Bird Industries by the act was
in all ways unamerican. The Supreme Court finally agreed, and in 1974,
Section II of the act was struck down. This in effect opened the market
to competition for all.
Today, Penis Bird Industries is almost no more. Today we have the market
leader Penis Bird Meat International facing against Penissoft, a recent
startup. Where will the future lead the penis bird market? Only time
will tell us, but one thing is certain: penis birds are here to stay!
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen
King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any
more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him
- even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his
contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community
when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now
down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the
heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has
lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've
known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly
exemplified by failing
dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to
predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a
bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because
*BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of
us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows
like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core
developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD
developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the
point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is
dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How
many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus
NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there
are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about
half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users
of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD
market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD
users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD
went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another
troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to
yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market
share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very
dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante
dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save
it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
this is the sixth text revision done on 04-11-2002.
dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,
first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source
of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into
writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in
a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may
find some interesting information within this text that you like to
read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes,
otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a
different operating system.
on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are
going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and
thinking about.
many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it
since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly
written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly
into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.
unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released
version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of
targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so
called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people
that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually
business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting
gnome on their computers.
having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under
contract by companies like redhat,
ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much
as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy
clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so
far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.
some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil windows
registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal
of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and
applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the
core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only
a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now
this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.
you may imagine that users got really frustrated
because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't
want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people
increased. more,
more
and more
emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain
their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.
but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what
their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up
with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users
should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are
being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the
user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't
really satisfying for the user. even constructive
feedback isn't appreciated.
if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden
that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development
team actually don't care for the complaining home user. it's more
important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that
this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about
gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication
isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our
users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you
afterwards.
i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on
programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the
reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what
matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake
up.
not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core
developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked
really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly
person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites
such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the
gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to
much.
with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened
such as button reordering. needless to say that this
confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages.
even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about
this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth
nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following
the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something
that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems
to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they
changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users
became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and
the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply
copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use
a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep
in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead
into weird button searching and clicking.
but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome
human
interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface
guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability
people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about
it the first
time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened
after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off
about this attitude. you can read more on this link. to
summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their
own business.
the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every
little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over
night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a
disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their
life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an
example look what happened to galeon's interface
(pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year
galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and
wrote this
email to the galeon mailinglist.
here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that
the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of
heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences
like the quoted ones.
"the user don't know what a window manager is"
"the user don't know what themes are"
"the user don't know what a homedir is"
"the user can't compile a kernel"
"the user don't want to customize their desktop"
"the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"
you may imagine that a lot of people are being offended by such lines
because it's exactly these gnome users who are meant by these phrases.
to read more such lines on the gnome mailinglists, simply click on this link and grep in their
archives. be said that most of these sentences are coming from havoc
pennington.
such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be
fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc
pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various
users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well
aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's
a reason why people are switching from alternative operating
systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the
system, they want to change everything they like.
to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus. the current maintainers got
the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented
user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact
words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by
clicking on this
link.
to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with
his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or
because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be
that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a
cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your
cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of
all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it
you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files
are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your
homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.
the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that
know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the
users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all
the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts
together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the
creators of the common desktop
environment. we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even
havoc pennington author of the good user
interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following
his rules.
not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus'
where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported
alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report
can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here
have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of
another crow out'. now you can click on this
link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from
various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and
nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's
there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on
this link.
the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome
community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to
go for
this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a
free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.
most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and
clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but
it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps.
you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which
basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented
preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the
possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with
that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in
a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you
delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees
and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a
discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a
registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years
but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most
retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy
is more retarded than the original.
it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash
by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't
know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor
people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies
such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you
could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork
gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the
code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source
the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it.
even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code -
go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any
direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.
well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and
let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things
are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party
projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components
into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86
version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code
like, gnome-xml, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were
mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome
development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the
look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp
has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on
integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure
and i fear the day this gonna happen.
it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the
gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that
don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have
gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the
same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting
other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and
applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the
pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to
solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big
companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with
gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it
rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86
with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way
having your settings defined with.xdefaults and all nice default
configurations are going into/etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on.
understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of
applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a
windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?
well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i
can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and
even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad
influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of
some gnome developers is another story since we are all different
reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts
otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even
amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that
hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right
now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out
that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the
contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are
reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around
1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation
of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so
much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.
now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to
think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of
gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that
the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they
plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not
happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen
King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any
more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him
- even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his
contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community
when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now
down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the
heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has
lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've
known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly
exemplified by failing
dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to
predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a
bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because
*BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of
us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows
like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core
developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD
developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the
point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is
dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How
many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus
NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there
are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about
half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users
of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD
market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD
users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD
went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another
troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to
yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market
share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very
dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante
dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save
it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
VHS might have been good, but we all know that
on
Why VHS Was Better
·
· Score: -1
It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community
when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now
down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the
heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has
lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've
known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly
exemplified by failing
dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to
predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a
bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because
*BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of
us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows
like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core
developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD
developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the
point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is
dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How
many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus
NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there
are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about
half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users
of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD
market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD
users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD
went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another
troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to
yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market
share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very
dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante
dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save
it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Sad news ... Stephen King dead at 54
on
Tuxedo Park
·
· Score: -1
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen
King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any
more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him
- even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his
contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
this is the sixth text revision done on 04-11-2002.
dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,
first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source
of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into
writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in
a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may
find some interesting information within this text that you like to
read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes,
otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a
different operating system.
on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are
going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and
thinking about.
many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it
since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly
written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly
into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.
unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released
version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of
targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so
called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people
that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually
business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting
gnome on their computers.
having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under
contract by companies like redhat,
ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much
as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy
clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so
far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.
some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil windows
registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal
of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and
applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the
core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only
a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now
this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.
you may imagine that users got really frustrated
because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't
want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people
increased. more,
more
and more
emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain
their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.
but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what
their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up
with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users
should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are
being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the
user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't
really satisfying for the user. even constructive
feedback isn't appreciated.
if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden
that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development
team actually don't care for the complaining home user. it's more
important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that
this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about
gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication
isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our
users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you
afterwards.
i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on
programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the
reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what
matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake
up.
not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core
developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked
really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly
person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites
such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the
gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to
much.
with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened
such as button reordering. needless to say that this
confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages.
even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about
this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth
nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following
the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something
that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems
to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they
changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users
became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and
the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply
copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use
a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep
in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead
into weird button searching and clicking.
but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome
human
interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface
guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability
people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about
it the first
time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened
after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off
about this attitude. you can read more on this link. to
summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their
own business.
the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every
little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over
night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a
disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their
life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an
example look what happened to galeon's interface
(pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year
galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and
wrote this
email to the galeon mailinglist.
here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that
the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of
heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences
like the quoted ones.
"the user don't know what a window manager is"
"the user don't know what themes are"
"the user don't know what a homedir is"
"the user can't compile a kernel"
"the user don't want to customize their desktop"
"the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"
you may imagine that a lot of people are being offended by such lines
because it's exactly these gnome users who are meant by these phrases.
to read more such lines on the gnome mailinglists, simply click on this link and grep in their
archives. be said that most of these sentences are coming from havoc
pennington.
such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be
fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc
pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various
users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well
aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's
a reason why people are switching from alternative operating
systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the
system, they want to change everything they like.
to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus. the current maintainers got
the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented
user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact
words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by
clicking on this
link.
to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with
his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or
because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be
that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a
cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your
cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of
all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it
you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files
are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your
homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.
the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that
know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the
users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all
the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts
together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the
creators of the common desktop
environment. we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even
havoc pennington author of the good user
interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following
his rules.
not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus'
where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported
alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report
can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here
have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of
another crow out'. now you can click on this
link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from
various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and
nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's
there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on
this link.
the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome
community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to
go for
this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a
free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.
most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and
clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but
it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps.
you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which
basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented
preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the
possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with
that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in
a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you
delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees
and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a
discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a
registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years
but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most
retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy
is more retarded than the original.
it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash
by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't
know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor
people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies
such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you
could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork
gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the
code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source
the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it.
even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code -
go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any
direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.
well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and
let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things
are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party
projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components
into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86
version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code
like, gnome-xml, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were
mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome
development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the
look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp
has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on
integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure
and i fear the day this gonna happen.
it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the
gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that
don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have
gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the
same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting
other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and
applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the
pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to
solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big
companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with
gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it
rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86
with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way
having your settings defined with.xdefaults and all nice default
configurations are going into/etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on.
understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of
applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a
windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?
well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i
can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and
even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad
influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of
some gnome developers is another story since we are all different
reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts
otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even
amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that
hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right
now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out
that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the
contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are
reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around
1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation
of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so
much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.
now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to
think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of
gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that
the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they
plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not
happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly
Slashdot Mirror
SMP-Oriented video cards rounds up YOU!
Mozilla, Gecko, Netscape has a future at YOU!
In the early 1870s, Francis Zefran became the first penis bird breeder in North America. He started his famous Penis Bird Ranch in Canton, OH. At the time, not much was known of the penis bird's nutritional value, but the Penis Bird Ranch changed all of that. Not only did Francis Zefran raise penis birds to sell their colorful plumes (a VERY lucrative business), he also set up the world's first research lab dedicated solely to the study of the penis bird.
The lab found many interesting things. First, it was discovered that thepenis bird was actually semi-sentient. Second, the scientists found that the meat of the penis bird was high in protein, vitamin A, vitamin B, and calcium, while low in fat, cholestorol, and sodium. Never before had such a nutritious meal been had without supplement or fortification. The scientists of the lab recommended immediately that the penis bird become a part of every American's daily diet.
When the news of the penis bird's usefulness reached president Rutherford B. Hayes, he was absolutely ecstatic. You see, President Hayes owed a number of favors to Francis Zefran because as I said earlier, the penis bird plume trade was an extremely lucrative business and Mr. Zefran was important in getting RBH elected through a number of monetary gifts. President Hayes immediately asked Congress to pass what we all know today as the Hayes/Zefran Penis Bird Consumption Act.
The act did a number of things to make the penis bird a daily meal, most important of which was the requirement that for every four people in a household, one penis bird must consumed every day. Another thing the act did was create an artificial monopoly for Francis Zefran's Penis Bird Industries. The act stated that the only supplier of penis bird meat in the US would be PBI. As one would imagine, this quickly made Francis Zefran into the richest man in the world. He was soon a multi-billionaire (quadrillionaire with today's inflation). Never before had a single man seen such wealth.
Many challenges were made to the Hayes/Zefran Penis Bird Consumption Act, and several even made it the Supreme Court. It was argued that the act was unconstitutional and went against liberty itself, but once the detractors tasted delicious penis bird meat for the first time, they immediately dropped their cases and followed the law to the letter. We all know today that penis bird is the most delicious meat man has ever known, but at that time, the only meats people ate were pork and beef.
In the early 1970s, though, challenges to the act began again. Many argued that the monopoly given to Penis Bird Industries by the act was in all ways unamerican. The Supreme Court finally agreed, and in 1974, Section II of the act was struck down. This in effect opened the market to competition for all.
Today, Penis Bird Industries is almost no more. Today we have the market leader Penis Bird Meat International facing against Penissoft, a recent startup. Where will the future lead the penis bird market? Only time will tell us, but one thing is certain: penis birds are here to stay!
In the early 1870s, Francis Zefran became the first penis bird breeder in North America. He started his famous Penis Bird Ranch in Canton, OH. At the time, not much was known of the penis bird's nutritional value, but the Penis Bird Ranch changed all of that. Not only did Francis Zefran raise penis birds to sell their colorful plumes (a VERY lucrative business), he also set up the world's first research lab dedicated solely to the study of the penis bird.
The lab found many interesting things. First, it was discovered that thepenis bird was actually semi-sentient. Second, the scientists found that the meat of the penis bird was high in protein, vitamin A, vitamin B, and calcium, while low in fat, cholestorol, and sodium. Never before had such a nutritious meal been had without supplement or fortification. The scientists of the lab recommended immediately that the penis bird become a part of every American's daily diet.
When the news of the penis bird's usefulness reached president Rutherford B. Hayes, he was absolutely ecstatic. You see, President Hayes owed a number of favors to Francis Zefran because as I said earlier, the penis bird plume trade was an extremely lucrative business and Mr. Zefran was important in getting RBH elected through a number of monetary gifts. President Hayes immediately asked Congress to pass what we all know today as the Hayes/Zefran Penis Bird Consumption Act.
The act did a number of things to make the penis bird a daily meal, most important of which was the requirement that for every four people in a household, one penis bird must consumed every day. Another thing the act did was create an artificial monopoly for Francis Zefran's Penis Bird Industries. The act stated that the only supplier of penis bird meat in the US would be PBI. As one would imagine, this quickly made Francis Zefran into the richest man in the world. He was soon a multi-billionaire (quadrillionaire with today's inflation). Never before had a single man seen such wealth.
Many challenges were made to the Hayes/Zefran Penis Bird Consumption Act, and several even made it the Supreme Court. It was argued that the act was unconstitutional and went against liberty itself, but once the detractors tasted delicious penis bird meat for the first time, they immediately dropped their cases and followed the law to the letter. We all know today that penis bird is the most delicious meat man has ever known, but at that time, the only meats people ate were pork and beef.
In the early 1970s, though, challenges to the act began again. Many argued that the monopoly given to Penis Bird Industries by the act was in all ways unamerican. The Supreme Court finally agreed, and in 1974, Section II of the act was struck down. This in effect opened the market to competition for all.
Today, Penis Bird Industries is almost no more. Today we have the market leader Penis Bird Meat International facing against Penissoft, a recent startup. Where will the future lead the penis bird market? Only time will tell us, but one thing is certain: penis birds are here to stay!
Google hits YOU!
Just check the "compare prices" link in the related box. I remember when slashdot was all underground and shit, but now it's just about the bling.
Hey ass-bandits. I said aftenposten. w00t!
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
or go there for that matter.
How did it feel to be ass-raped by Bruno?
A: Four in the seats and seven in the ashtray.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,
first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.
on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.
many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.
unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.
having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat, ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.
some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.
you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.
but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.
if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.
i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.
not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.
with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering. needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.
but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link. to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.
the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.
here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.
- "the user don't know what a window manager is"
- "the user don't know what themes are"
- "the user don't know what a homedir is"
- "the user can't compile a kernel"
- "the user don't want to customize their desktop"
- "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"
you may imagine that a lot of people are being offended by such lines because it's exactly these gnome users who are meant by these phrases. to read more such lines on the gnome mailinglists, simply click on this link and grep in their archives. be said that most of these sentences are coming from havoc pennington.such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.
to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus. the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link.
to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.
the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment. we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.
not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link.
the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.
most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.
it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.
well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.
it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default
configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on.
understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of
applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a
windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?
well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.
now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Does that mean that Tim Berners-Lee is also a racist fuck with bad writing skills?
YOU FAIL IT!
It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
YOU FAIL IT!
dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,
first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.
on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.
many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.
unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.
having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat, ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.
some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.
you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.
but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.
if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care for the complaining home user. it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. it seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders. everything about gnome has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. they listen to you - yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.
i thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. but the reality looks like it's all for the big money. the cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. time for people to wake up.
not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer martin baulig out of team. a guy who worked really hard on getting gnome into the right direction. a nice friendly person who put all his time into gnome. but narrow minded gnome elites such as havoc pennington were responsible that he left the gnome project. the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.
with the new gnome desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering. needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. even our fellow linux guru alan cox wasn't thrilled about this idea. but the gnome elites such as havoc pennington, seth nickell, calum benson and dave bordoley knew it better. why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? well it seems to be too easy. gnome needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. they said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. but i belive they simply copied the behaviour of macos because most of the gnome developers use a macintosh as either laptop or desktop. sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.
but as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new gnome human interface guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. the announcement contained informations that the kde usability people got initiated into it. unfortunately the kde people heard about it the first time when seth nickell went to the kde mailinglist which happened after the announcement. you can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. you can read more on this link. to summarize it, the kde people clarified that gnome should care for their own business.
the problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little gnome hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. a lot of gnome programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. for an example look what happened to galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). even philip langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that gnome leads and wrote this email to the galeon mailinglist.
here another reason why users became angry. the elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.
- "the user don't know what a window manager is"
- "the user don't know what themes are"
- "the user don't know what a homedir is"
- "the user can't compile a kernel"
- "the user don't want to customize their desktop"
- "the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"
you may imagine that a lot of people are being offended by such lines because it's exactly these gnome users who are meant by these phrases. to read more such lines on the gnome mailinglists, simply click on this link and grep in their archives. be said that most of these sentences are coming from havoc pennington.such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. u*nix users aren't stupid people. who actually gave havoc pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? various users told him that people who use a u*nix like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. there's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. they want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.
to top all this, look at the future plans of nautilus. the current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. you may be highly interested in reading the exact words of alex larsson's vision for nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link.
to summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. the new concepts of nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the nautilus view. e.g. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. you don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.
the question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying gnome ? the users don't deserve all this specially those that backed gnome for all the years. even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on gnome. don't forget that sun are the creators of the common desktop environment. we don't need another cde clone named gnome. even havoc pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.
not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of nautilus' where the reporter (uraeus a gnome contributor himself) reported alexander larsson and david camp. you may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. we here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. now you can click on this link and read more. it may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about gnome and nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link.
the fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the gnome community. finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.
most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. people started to remove everything from their apps. you're forced to use dubious programs like gconf-editor which basically works like the windows registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. i don't think that this is an advantage. even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of gconf. all your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. at the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. we didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the gnome development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from windows to u*nix. not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.
it's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. but there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. everything around gnome is a big marketing strategy. poor people are working the hell out of gnome for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork gnome - but seriously how can you go and fork gnome ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the gnu/gpl or gnu/lgpl, you can't own it. even the companies are aware of this. but if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. you can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. exactly this is happening with gnome.
well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use gnome and let them do whatever they like. well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. gnome is influencing a lot of third party projects such as xfree86 which recently added a lot of gnome components into their cvs repository. please know that with the next coming xfree86 version you get a lot of gnome components without even knowing it. code like, gnome-xml, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into gnome development. also the gimp is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native gnome application. the cvs version of the gimp has a lot of gnome pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the gimp into gnome. if not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.
it's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see xfree86 and the gimp are beeing hacked on. but please think about the people that don't like or use gnome. what about them ? why force them to have gnome components installed on their systems ? why can't gnome go the same way that kde went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like aids. seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to gnome jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. look what will happen to solaris, the world famous operating system on u*nix used by big companies and long years experts. they really plan to replace cde with gnome. i know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of xfree86 with their configuration system than gnome. you know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default
configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on.
understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of
applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a
windows registry like system that replaces future configuration ?
well to come to an end i personally don't like many of this stuff. i can't stand the button reordering, i don't like the gconf system and even more i don't like the commercial outsourcing of gnome and the bad influence that gnome has on other applications. the bad attitude of some gnome developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise i wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. even amongst the gnome developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else. right now if you checkout the gnome cvs repository every day you find out that the whole gnome development seemed to came to an halt. the contributions to their cvs are poor. while projects such as kde are reaching easily 10-20k commits per month - gnome is getting around 1-2k per month on it's best times. it really looks like the situation of gnome is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.
now i hope this text was informative for you. i hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. the situation of gnome is unclear, their target is groggy too since i can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of u*nix or linux. they plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly
479,928 writeups done by angsy middle-class whiteboys who think they're Derrida. Fuck that pompous shit.
they censor 100.000 articles.
YOU FAIL IT!
Shouts to all my dead Old Kike's.